Obama Finds His Voice on Cuts That Matter: Margaret Carlson

By Margaret Carlson -
Apr 13, 2011

Since presenting their budget
demands, Republicans have been bold and tough -- sometimes by
their own description -- while President Barack Obama has been
missing in action and, when present, prone to being bullied.

Whupped like a puppy to avoid a government shutdown last
week, Obama proved there’s such a thing as being too good a
sport. He hailed the agreement to cut $38 billion from the
current federal budget as if he’d actually been for “the
biggest annual spending cut in history” that brought
“Americans of different beliefs” together.

Leave it to the compromiser-in-chief to find a non-existent
pony in the manure (to borrow from that incurable optimist,
Ronald Reagan) while encouraging the bullies to bully again.
Since the 2010 midterm elections, Obama has been at such pains
to be seen navigating the ship of state calmly through choppy
political waters, giving in on taxes during the lame-duck
session to prove it, that he has let the national conversation
on budget and taxes proceed on Republican terms -- that is, to
ignore revenue and attack spending.

Yesterday, at long last, Obama called a spade a spade. He
got to the black heart of the Republican budget plan going
forward: They propose to afflict the afflicted, and comfort the
comfortable, with a combination of draconian spending cuts that
disproportionately hurt the middle and working classes and tax
cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, who are taxed
at some of the lowest levels since the Great Depression.

Cuts for Billionaires

It’s a version of killing the patient to save the patient,
raising the deficit to lower it. Of the Republican plan authored
by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Obama
said: “There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to
reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts
for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s
anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who
can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.”

The cutters in Congress were negative in their “pre-
buttals” and cynical in their remarks after. “I thought to
myself, ‘And I missed lunch for this?” quipped Representative
Jeb Hensarling of Texas, chairman of the House Republican
Conference. His colleagues repeated the word “disappointed,”
as if Republicans are the parents taking away Obama’s bike for
his own good.

Tomorrow they’ll cry “class warfare,” as if they aren’t
the ones waging it. Speaker John Boehner said raising taxes on
top earners is a “non-starter.” To the financial institutions
that got us into this mess and remain too big to fail, we can
now add the wealthy, who are evidently too big to tax.

Specific Enough

They were also critical of a lack of specificity, when, in
fact, the president laid out where he would cut, where he would
tax, and where he would save money.

To reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over 12 years, he
would slice non-security discretionary spending to levels that
would save $770 billion by 2023, pare mandatory spending with
the goal of saving $360 billion, simplify the tax code by ending
breaks that don’t go to the great majority of non-itemizing
taxpayers, and mandate that Congress pass across-the-board
spending reductions if the nation’s debt isn’t declining as a
share of the economy by the second half of the decade.

And he laid out what he would preserve, particularly
Medicare.

Medicare was created in 1965 because so many seniors -- a
cohort beset by pre-existing conditions -- couldn’t find
coverage from an industry largely throwing scams at them.
Medicare fixed that. In the Republican budget, there’s no
mending Medicare. There’s only ending Medicare, with a voucher
program that would send seniors back out into a merciless
marketplace that Boehner and Ryan somehow see as benign.

Misplaced Respect

For all the talk of what a profligate country we are,
Republicans are playing to our lingering Puritan streak, the
misplaced respect for the Donald Trumps in our society who
already have the world’s breaks tilted in their favor, and the
way we fall for focus-grouped phrases such as “adult,”
“serious,” and “for our children’s sake.”

The president can hardly get the debate back in his court
in one speech. The U.S. is splintered into a hundred
intellectual and emotional pieces, many with their own facts.
Perhaps the biggest point of contention in the threatened
shutdown was Planned Parenthood, among the lowest-cost care
providers for women. Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona,
claimed that more than 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s work
is abortions. It’s only 3 percent. His staff said his comment
was “not intended to be a factual statement.”

Leave the bubble of Washington and New York and enter a
world of foreclosed houses, shuttered stores and 50-year-old
former middle managers flipping hamburgers and feeling lucky to
do so. The gap between Wall Street enjoying shocking profits and
the janitor living in a trailer park has never been greater,
each increasingly represented by its own party. It’s going to
take many more speeches for the president to bridge that divide.

(Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How
George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White
House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News
columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)